Anarchism in Tunisia: Nicolò (Nicolantonio) Converti, 1855-1939

English translation by Nestor McNab, 2011.

Born in Roseto Capo Spulico (in the province of Cosenza, Calabria) on 18
March 1855, his parents were Leonardo and Elisabetta Aletta, both from
well-off families. He attended primary school in Calabria and moved to
Naples to attend high school, where his teacher for the final year was
Giovanni Bovio. He went on to university to study medicine, though he
did not graduate - as he said to A[ndrea]Costa (with whom he would
always remain friends) - until several years later in 1909 when, after a
long spell in Tunis, the city he was to choose as his principal
residence, he returned to Italy for the first time.

Becoming attracted to the ideas of libertarian socialism, which were
widely known in Naples thanks to the influence of Bakunin who had lived
in the town, he became friends with E[milio] Covelli and other
Neapolitan militants. He joined the International, quickly becoming the
most active member of the Neapolitan group, and carried on intense
propaganda activity, both with contributions to the existing press at
the time and with the creation of new bulletins. In 1878 he joined the
editorial board of the periodical "Il Masaniello" a fortnightly which,
in seeking to fill the gap left by the move of the weekly "L'Anarchia"
to Florence, favoured an alliance with the authoritarian socialists. The
newspaper, however, was short-lived and after nine issues, each
systematically impounded by the police, it suspended publication.

Relations between CConverti and the other Internationals, however, did
not come to an end, and led to the founding of the "Pisacane" circle,
with Converti as secretary and Merlino as treasurer; there were also
several projects, such as one to print a Neapolitan anarchist newspaper
(entitled "La Campana"), reviving the previous newspaper and founding a
newspaper to counter the positions of Costa. Both plans went awry,
partly as a result of clashes amongst the workers among the members, who
favoured policies linked to the particular problems of labour but who
often lacked the ability to think in wider terms, and the
"intransigently" anarchist intellectuals, who were all given to
utopistic dreaming and were often unable to reconcile "final goals and
intermediate objectives".

In May 1885, Converti published "Il Piccone" in brochure format (as it
lacked the necessary authorization). It was an anarchist communist
newspaper that was quite rigorous with both the legalitarian socialists
and Costa, and with the Republicans, who were in those years of
irredentism, held to be the most dangerous elements to the anarchist
cause. But his forced departure for France meant that he left the
Neapolitan anarchist movement in difficulty (and indeed the movement
would henceforth become indistinguishable from the socialist movement
and radical democracy in general), halting publication of the newspaper
for a month and only succeeding in recommencing, until November, thanks
to an editorial team composed entirely of students.

Though by now out of Italy, C. also supported "Il Demolitore", the
newspaper of the Neapolitan "Il Lavoratore" Circle, in which he
published a letter written together with G(aetano?) Grassi where the two
anarchists took a strong position in favour of a modern revolutionary
organization. He contributed to the Milan magazine, "Rivista
internazionale del socialism" (in which he published an article entitled
"La proprietà" ["Property"]), to the Pesaro weekly "In Marcia" and to
other anarchist-inspired periodicals, including "Il Proletario" from
Palermo, in which he published an article entitled Anarchia ["Anarchy"]
that concluded by saying "anarchy without communism is impossible". A
turning point in his life came in 1885 when, having been sentenced to 22
months in prison for signing "a manifesto by the International (the
last to be published in Italy) signed by over 300 delegates of branches
and federations", for which "only about fifteen were tried" and "appeals
were lodged just to give enough time for the accused to flee the
country" ("L'Adunata dei refrattari", 28 Oct. 1939, p.5), he took the
decision to leave Italy.

Embarking at Livorno, he took refuge in Corsica and then moved to
southern France, first at Nice, where he shifted the editorial line of
the newspaper "Lo Schiavo" to one of revolutionary anarchism, and then
in Marseilles. Here he would once again begin to engage in revolutionary
propaganda and with the help of some Italian and French anarchists, he
founded the "L'Internationale anarchiste", which eventually came out on
the 16 October 1886 after struggling to find funding. The newspaper,
containing articles in both French and Italian, had a run of four issues
and was quite an important novelty for the anarchist press.

As he wrote in the editorial, the paper set itself the task of "bringing
an end to the hatred created and sustained by the bourgeois press
between French and Italian workers", and also the goal engaging in
quality criticism of Republican institutions and doctrine.

These positions were later set out in the pamphlet "Repubblica ed
Anarchia" (Tunis, 1889), which is the most important theoretical
contribution by Converti and were also republished in the Italian press
at the time. The programmatic elements of the pamphlet were rejected
however, in particular by E. Matteucci in the Rome newspaper
"L'Emancipazione", and it was impounded by the authorities. Having
failed to conclude an arrangement to contribute regularly to two medical
journals in Paris, C. moved definitively to Tunis with his friend
Grassi on 10 January 1887, once again leaving the Italian anarchist
movement in southern France in difficulty.

Since the earliest period of the liberal movement during the years of
the Risorgimento, the African city had become a place of refuge for
numerous Italians (particularly Sicilians) suffering from political
persecution, and was home to a community of bourgeois and illiterate
proletarians who mixed readily with the locals and consisted of over
100,000 individuals by 1912. In this community, considered at the time
to be a sort of African appendix to Italy's territory and which was
predominantly Italian-speaking, and thanks to the circle of friends he
soon made (through his uncle, a bishop, according to some sources),
Converti was to live the rest of his life, working with great dedication
as a doctor in the local hospitals.

A note by the Prefect of Cosenza indicates that Converti graduated in
medicine in Tunis thanks to favourable intervention by a cardinal. But
having obtained his degree, his sterling work contributed to the
extension of the Tunisian healthcare system -in his opinion far from
being acceptable - and setting up the "Green Cross" Relief Society
[Società di soccorso "Croce Verde"], to the approval even of Muslims, an
organization which he presided over for several decades.

Apart from his work as a doctor to the indigent, C. soon became one of
the fathers of the Maghrebi workers movement, continuing his
journalistic battles, remaining in contact with international
libertarian circles, contributing to several Italian and foreign
anarchist papers and publishing "L'Operaio" in 1887, a weekly that
described itself as the mouthpiece of the anarchists of Tunis and
Sicily. With simple language and a style which avoided emphasis and
rhetoric, this "rag" - produced at the newspapers own press - attacked
the two main Christian groups of the local bourgeoisie, the French and
Italian, thus seeking to "shake the workers and the grey mass of the
indifferent out of their apathy" about the exploitation being carried
out by the larger companies. Later there followed a syndicalist
newspaper, "La Voix de l'Ouvrier", in which Converti busied himself by
studying the causes of misery and possible cures for this curse.

At the same time, C. formed an active anarchist propaganda group, a real
hive of conspiracy which was also set up in order to organize and aid
Italian anarchists who had fled to Tunisia in order to escape forced
residence [translator's note: used as punishment for political crimes,
but also as a preventive measure; it was not imprisonment or
confinement, but one was forced to live in a certain place, usually an
inaccessible spot or island and weren't free to move away] in the
various islands of Sicily (mainly Favignana and Pantelleria).

In 1896 he started the theoretical magazine "La Protesta umana", whose
contributors included well-known libertarian writers of the time such as
A[ugustin] Hamon, L[uigi] Fabbri, A[milcare] Cipriani and P. Raveggi.
Converti published some of his own writings too, including a three-part
essay, "Idee generali" ("General Ideas"), in which he polemicized with
the German theoreticians of naturalism about the concept of the State,
seen as the "brain" of the social body. There was also an important and
vibrant protest in defence of some Italian anarchists who had fled their
forced residence, landed on the shores of Tunisia and been handed over
to the French and Italian authorities. After an interval of some time
due to tax reasons, the magazine was moved for one issue (June 1897) to
Macerata, qualifying it as the only anarchist publication [in Italy] at
the time.

In order to spread his theories, C. did not disdain from writing for
certain bourgeois democratic news-sheets in the years between 1894 and
1913; many French and Italian newspapers, anarchist or otherwise,
published his articles concerning the debate on the political and
economic organization of the working masses. These papers included: "La
Petite Tunisie" from Tunis, "L'Avenir social" and "Le Courier", both
from Tunis, "L'Emancipateur" from Algiers, "Il Progresso" from Palermo,
"Il Picconiere" from Marseilles, "L'Avvenire sociale" from Messina, all
of which were anarchist papers; "Il Secolo" and "La Gazzetta" from
Milan, "Il Momento" from Paris and also the "Unione" from Tunis, the
official mouthpiece of the Italian community, founded by the Livornese.

In the early 1900s, there was a partial evolution in his revolutionary
propaganda, partly due to the conditions of the Tunisian working class,
who were the target of great attention from democratic circles, and this
led to the creation of benevolent societies as well as a move towards
the ideas and the parliamentarianism of Costa, who visited Tunis in
December 1907 and who indicated in a letter his intention to see
Converti after so many years. The meeting, if it did come about, was
certainly decisive in the decision he made in 1913 when in Calabria to
allow himself to be carried along by a vast popular movement that
started in the Upper Ionian region of Cosenza province in order to bring
attention to the need for certain types of infrastructure in the zone.

All this led him into toying with the idea of driving the masses into
forms of direct political action and he created uproar in Italian and
European anarchist circles by standing as a candidate in the Cassano
Ionio constituency for the 26 October elections, on an
anarchist-communist platform. His attempt naturally failed, despite a
vigorous election campaign, and remained as a purely theoretical protest
against the centralizing State.

Having returned once again to Tunis after a further journey of several
weeks in November of that year to his own country, he dedicated himself
to his work and family. He continued to work until the early 1930s as a
doctor on the night shift at the Italian colonial hospital G. Garibaldi,
which he had also helped to found. During the Fascist period he
continued his activities, maintaining constant links with C[amillo]
Berneri and anarchist and anti-fascist circles in France and America,
and "in his few remaining writings, he returned to the volcanic
phraseology of his early youth" ([A.] Riggio, ["Un libertario calabrese
in Tunisia: N.C.", in "Archivio storico per la Calabria e la Lucania,"
nn. 1-4, 1947 ] p.87).

While noting that Converti was a die-hard, militant anarchist and "a
declared adversary of the regime against which he speaks and writes
quite frequently", in March 1933 the Italian consul in Tunis (who had
him closely watched in case he were to organize a mission to Italy "for
unknown reasons") rejected the possibility that "he [had it] in mind to
come to Italy for any criminal intent", even though he could be
considered as an individual who was capable of providing aid of any kind
to elements who may well commit criminal acts. On 14 August 1936 -
according to the consul - he participated in a demonstration in support
of the Spanish Popular Front and spoke out to declare his faith "in a
better future for a regenerated, more fraternal humanity and to send his
greetings to his comrades in Spain who are fighting for the triumph of
liberty".

He died in Tunis on 14 September 1939 and at his funeral, where he was
eulogized by the anarchist Sapelli, the entire anti-fascist community of
Tunisia turned out to salute him as one.